Power Rangers: Zone Wars
by WolfsbaneX
Summary: While searching for a lost item, a cowboy from 1864 is transported to 3091 and discovers a horrible future. Luckily, he's in a postion to change it. With the help of an underground network, and a few teenagers from 2011, can he pull it off? This is a promotion for my Power Rangers: Custom challenge on the Original Ranger Team Forum.
1. Drop Zone

**This story is to promote my newest challenge, Power Rangers Custom. Details are in the Original Ranger Teams Forum under Challenges. It's highly recommended for those who want to test their writings skills. And with that, on with the story!**

* * *

**Power Rangers Zone Wars**

**Drop Zone**

_Mid-West United States, 1864_

The midday sun beat down on a ghost town as a horse clomped down the dirt street, his rider's spurs jingling softly. The faded signs all around them announced their building's original purpose: Hotel, Grocery Store, Saloon, Sheriff's Office.

The cowboy, who looked about thirty, took his hat off of his head and dusted it off, his blond hair messy from wearing it for so long. He pulled his horse's reigns and dismounted, his rattlesnake boots hitting the ground with a thump. The dust it kicked up got on his black pants, but he didn't seem to care. The cowboy rubbed his stubbly chin as he took the horse's reigns and tied it to the post in front of the Sheriff's Office.

Looking around, the office seeming like nothing much: two empty jail cells with wooden benches and a bucket for getting rid of waste, a wood stove, three chairs and a wooden desk. Now, for what he had come for. The cowboy walked over to the desk and opened a drawer. It didn't have much in it either: a six-shooter and a few bullets, old wanted posters, a few valuables. Finally, after scavenging through the drawer, he found it: the golden pocket watch that his grandfather had given to him. On the outside was inscribed "John McArthur", this his granddad had done for him (he was a goldsmith), and a date which was hard to see because of the dust.

John McArthur smiled as he opened his pocket watch. The upper part was empty while the bottom half was the actual watch. The clock had obviously stopped. Then again, it was a pocket watch; if you didn't rewind it, then it would stop working. John gently took the dial on the watch and twisted it to the right, but the watch didn't restart. Instead, it started to glow green and purple and hummed eerily.

"What in the Sam Hill?" the cowboy said before being transported over time and space.

_Zone 1, 3091_

John McArthur looked around at the desecrated landscape and the blacked out sky. Around were explosions, laser guns shooting, planes whooshing overhead, and bombs whistling through the air. One of these was relatively close to John, causing him to fly into a nearby trench. John's hat flew right off of his head and mud smeared his face and clothes.

The cowboy could hear rapid fire orders that reminded him of how his older brother described the war with the Yanks when he went to visit them in Virginia. General Lee was over him, and probably would be over John, too, if it wasn't for the Gold Rush. John looked at his pocket watch and wandered into his memories.

It was 1849 when he had decided to go with his grandfather to California. Being only fifteen, his parents had strongly opposed, but his mind was made up. In the dead of night, he snuck off to his grandfather's and was headed west with the old man. John had gotten a job on a ranch as a wrangler while his granddad worked in prospecting the land he had bought.

Suddenly, a voice cut off all those memories with a bark: "Hey, you! What are you doing lying down on the job?"

John hopped up to his feet and replied, "Pardon me, but I don't reckon I belong here."

The cowboy turned around to see a burly man in muddy army fatigues, cradling a rifle, or at least what looked like a rifle to John, in his right arm.

"Oh, really?" the soldier replied sardonically, "Who is the president?"

"That's easy. Jefferson Davis is the Confederacy's president and Lincoln is the Union's," John answered, a genuine smile on his face.

The soldier looked at the cowboy, surprised. Then again, it could have been the bomb that went off nearby. The two fell away from the bomb, being slung into the mud. The soldier wiped the mud off of his face as did John, the latter rather annoyed to have slid through the mud twice in his work clothes. The two got up, the soldier being the first one up. He offered John his hand, which the cowboy accepted.

"Then, you're from before the assassination," the soldier noted to himself.

John heard this and looked at the soldier, confused. "The what?"

"The Union won the Civil war in 1865 and Lincoln was shot by Booth at the theater a little while later," the soldier recalled aloud.

John snapped his fingers. "Aw, shoot. And I thought we were winning. Well, we were until Grant showed up."

"So, you're…" the soldier continued, still a little shocked.

John looked around for his hat, found it, put it on, and tilted it down. "The name's John McArthur, at your service."

The soldier nodded, "Tony Owens, General for Zone 1."

"Zone 1?" John inquired, sitting down on the ground.

"You've been transported to the year 3091," Owens explained. "I have to catch you up on a lot of stuff. After the Civil War, the South returns to the Union after Reconstruction. In 1914, there's a world war. At the time, it was called the Great War, but we know it as World War I. It ended with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, along with a few other treaties. Just about that time came what we call the Roaring Twenties…"

After a few minutes of drawling on with the history lesson, including the affairs of SPD and Time Force, Owens finally got to the more recent events.

"…After the arrest of Ransik, the public hailed Time Force as heroes. However, a few years later, an alien force known as Voltage that had been hiding on Earth since 2011 came and wiped them out overnight. They forced us into Zones and then forced the Zones to fight each other until one Zone is left. The only Zones left now are Zones 1 through 5, 10, and 23,415,609," Owens concluded, a little out of breath.

John stared at the soldier and sat on the ground. "All of this history that I missed. I just came here because of my lost watch."

The cowboy held up his pocket watch to the soldier, who looked at it in delighted surprise.

"Which means you can go back!" Owens exclaimed excitedly. "It was revealed lately that Voltage was hiding in a little town that disappeared on May 7, 2011 without a trace."

John jumped up excitedly. "Hey, isn't today May 7? It was when I was in 1864."

Owens frowned in concentration. "The days blur together. I'll have to check."

The soldier looked down at his wristwatch, which suddenly began to glow. The upper half of John's pocket began to glow as well, John's face showing on the place above the clock itself.

"What the…" Owens began, looking up at John who looked back.

John pointed to the watch. "Who made that?"

Owens looked at the watch and replied, "It was made from the gold of a certain goldsmith that did his own prospecting after the land ran dry in the 20's. Every few years, people upgrade the face of the watch. Can't quite remember what Mom said his name was. It was something along the lines of Boone. Or was it Baring? Maybe Brunson? Banner?"

"Benson?" John offered.

"That's it," Owens replied with a nod, "Earl Benson."

John nodded. "That's my granddad. He made me this watch from the first gold he ever prospected."

Owens nodded back. "So, the anomalies in these timepieces are connected."

John looked at Owens's wristwatch curiously. "The anoma-what?"

"The weird things. Y'know, you travelling to this time from 1864. I think that it latched onto my watch and the two connected somehow."

John gaped and replied, "Oh."

"It must be that mild radiation they said was in the gold," Owens said, looking at his watch face. "Yeah, it's May 7."

"Which means that, I can catch the disappearance in the act and stop it," John said, looking at the soldier.

Owens thought for a minute, then rummaged through his pockets until he found the item he was looking for. He looked down and smiled.

"Get someone from that time to use this," Owens said, offering him a deck of cards.

John took the cards and examined them for a moment. The backs of the cards were red with white trim around edges with a stylized Hindu-Arabic numeral one surrounded by a circle in the middle of the card. Shuffling through the deck, John noted that these were not playing cards. He stopped at one that had the picture of a mechanized gorilla on it and looked at Owens in confusion.

"This is the Rouge Deck, the pride of Zone 1," Owens explained. "It endows the user with great strength, like that of a gorilla. What you need to do is get Zones 2 through 5's decks as well as the Scan Morphers in Zone 2."

John scratched his head. "So, what are the decks?"

"A man from Zone 3 once said theirs was called the Noir Deck," Owens replied, scratching his chin. "Zone 2 has had their Bleu Deck for a while. Few years after that, Zone 4 got their Jaune Deck. Zone 5 recently got theirs, the Rose Deck."

John's eyes were wide at this point. "So, how exactly am I supposed to get these Decks?"

"Go to the other Zones and find an officer with something similar to this on," Owens replied, tugging at a pen that was ruby encrusted pen with the number one on it on his lapel. "Then tell them 'Voltage is decreasing'. They'll know what it means."

The two ducked as a bomb went off in front of the trench. John looked at Owens like he was crazy.

"I have to go through that?" the cowboy said, pointing skeptically at the no man's land before him.

"Of course not," Owens replied, lifting a board on the ground, revealing a flight of dusty stairs. "This is a network underneath the Zones. You go down here, you find the doors that are marked two, three, four, and five, and be courteous: knock before anything else."

John nodded and told him with a smile. "Wish me luck."

With that, the cowboy descended the stairs, the wooden board shutting behind him.

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Trivia: This was my challenge:

W – Aliens

O – War

L - Western

F – Covert Operations

S – Stats

B – Numbers

A – "Voltage"

N – Time travel

E – Cards of some sort

X – Animal spirits

Of course, not everything has quite come into play yet, but that's to come. So, if you're going to do the challenge, don't be afraid to PM me.


	2. Going Under

**Power Rangers Zone Wars**

**Going Under**

_Underground Tunnel System, 3091_

The ground shook a little as John felt through the underground tunnel, the glow stick that Owens had dropped him after a few minutes held out in front of him. The cowboy was amazed by the doohickies of this time. Of course, the rifles had seemed a little odd, but the flying machines were truly a marvel. Not in a million years would he have believed that two boys from Ohio would make a machine that could fly on its own. John shook the glow stick a little and shook his head in amazement. Fire-less light created from mixing two chemicals. Who knew?

He had kept his cool in front of Owens, but the two thousand plus years of history were rather heavy on John's back. Wars and movements and inventions that were so different from his time. The politicians, the scandals, everything. It was a bit of a shock. Then again, so is suddenly appearing in a war zone. The ground shook again, this time knocking John to his feet. The cowboy dug into his pocket for the Rouge Deck and pulled out a card. He examined the front of the card, which read "Strength Up" with a picture of a muscle with a red upward arrow tattoo on the upper arm when he held the glow stick to it. John looked at the card oddly, then replaced it into the deck, putting the cards back in his pocket.

Another shaking fit caused the cowboy to hit the bottom of the tunnel hard. John got up, brushed himself off, and trudged on. A few minutes of going almost blindly through the tunnel and the cowboy found a panel with a blue number two on it above him. John knocked on the wood, the loud thunks echoing through the tunnel. There was an empty silence as John waited for someone to answer. The board flew up and the next thing John knew a laser rifle was pointed at his face.

"Who are you?" a gruff female voice came, John looking up in shock.

John looked past the barrel of the firearm to the person armed with it: a woman with shoulder length hair caked with so much mud it was impossible to tell the color. Her blue-green eyes were hostile and her expression was hard, the grime on her cheeks and neck implying it had been there a while. On her lapel was a blue version of Owens's pin with a two instead of a one and John's eyes widened when he saw it.

"...V-voltage is d-decreasing," John managed, the nervousness of looking down the barrel of a gun affecting his speech.

The woman's expression softened as she lowered her rifle, blinking. John crawled out of the tunnel and looked around at the Zone 2 trench. It differed little to the one in Zone 2, sans a few more high-tech looking weapons.

"Oh, you're part of the Renaissance Project," the woman said, her voice a little less coarse.

John gaped for a while, but, eventually, he replied with, "Well, you see I just got here from 1864 and I'm a little shaken up by the bombs... They're called bombs, right? Anyway, I have no idea what this Renaissance Project is; General Owens just told me to say that."

The woman raised her eyebrow, to which John pulled out the Rouge Deck. "I assume you have one of these?"

"I apologize for my earlier behavior," the woman said, pulling out a blue deck of cards. "The name's Josephine Jaime Ferra, but my friends call me 'JJ' for short. To my lessers, it's General Ferra."

John reached out and took the Bleu Deck gingerly. "Thank you very kindly, ma'am."

"Oh, yeah, almost forgot," Ferra told him. She opened a case and threw the cowboy five devices.

John shoved the Bleu Deck into his other pocket and caught all of them, almost dropping the third and the fifth ones. The cowboy looked at the device; he didn't recognize it at all. It looked a little bit like the Dobereiner's Lamp that the German fellow in John and his grandfather's wagon train had, but significantly smaller, to the point to where you could hold it in your hand.

Each was a different color and the lever was gone, but the pseudo-cylindrical shape was retained. The material that the devices were made of was cold and hard in John's hands; he guessed that the glass had been traded for a sturdy metal. He noticed a notch on the bottom that might connect to a chain and nodded to himself. Quickly, he dropped them in his vest pocket, first red, then blue, black, yellow, and finally pink.

"Those are..." John began.

"The Scan Morphers, right," Ferra replied. "They're yours now."

John's expression became skeptical. "Wait, so you're going to trust me after saying a phrase?"

Ferra shrugged and said, "It was a code-phrase after all."

John shook his head in disbelief as he let out a nervous chuckle. "The future is mighty strange."

And with that, the cowboy ducked back into the tunnel, closing the trapdoor behind him. John shook his glow stick a little and proceeded forward. After a few minutes of wondering around, he came to a T-like point. John groaned to himself and trekked forward. Suddenly, a short, Asian man in a uniform charged him and tackled him to the tunnel floor.

"Who the dickens are you?" the man roared, snatching John up by his shirt front.

John let out a sheepish laugh and replied timidly, "V-voltage is decreasing?"

The Asian man looked at the cowboy skeptically, letting him go. The cowboy fell to the ground, groaning.

"Ah, a Renaissance man?" he asked John with a chuckle, offering his hand.

The cowboy took it and the smaller man pulled him up. "Not really. I was wondering if you had one of these for me."

The cowboy retrieved a deck of cards from his pants pocket, this new person John had met looking them over.

"Nah, that's the general's job. I'm just a Sergeant," the Asian man replied with a smile, extending his hand, "The name's Dan. Dan Yung."

"John McArthur," the cowboy replied, pulling out one of the devices that Ferra had given him.

"Holy smokes!" Dan exclaimed, looking at the device, "A Scan Morpher."

The Asian nodded and said, "Right. I've got to get you to General Isen right away!"

John nodded back. "Lead the way."

Sergeant Yung began walking through the tunnel, this time back the way he had come.

"Uh, you want to talk to pass the time?" Yung asked after a few minutes of silence.

"Actually, I'd like to ask some questions," John replied, looking down at his pocket watch.

Yung grunted. "Well, I'll answer what I can."

"What's the deal with this tunnel? I mean, why was it made?"

Yung stopped and felt the wall of the tunnel, then shook his head to himself. "The tunnel network was something Zone 2 came up with actually. They were going to attack Zones 1, 3, 4, and 5 via these tunnels to avenge a person that had been killed, the Voltage said, by one of those four. When they raided, the former general of Zone 2 interrogated the other generals to find out which one had bombed them. Of course, you know no one was at fault. The Voltage dropped that bomb. From that day on, the five Zones were allies. We use the tunnel system to communicate."

"Well, if y'all are all 'compadres', then why do you still fight each other?" John retorted as Yung began to start walking again.

"To make sure Voltage is unaware of the Renaissance Project's existence," Yung replied, feeling the wall again.

This time, the Asian man found what he was looking for and pressed a small pebble that stuck out from the wall ever so slightly. Instantly, the wall beside them opened up to reveal a wooden panel with a black number three on it. John looked skeptically at Yung, who shrugged in response.

"Ah, us Threers like our stealthiness," Yung replied with a chuckle.

John stopped and frowned in confusion. "What's a Threer?"

Yung laughed and shook his head. "Every Zone refers to the members of the others by certain names. It used to be derogatory, but now it's kinda like a citizenship name. Y'know, like people from New York being called New Yorkers. We call Zone 1 people Oneys. Zone 2 people are called Paralls. We in Zone 3 are called Threers. If you were to address someone in Zone 4, you'd call 'em a Gravian. Zone 5's guys are named Fibonacks."

John wore a confused look as the two crawled through the opening and it shut behind them with a sound of rocks grinding together and a thud. Yu led the cowboy up a flight of stairs leading to up to a wooden board with a black "3" on it in a circle.

The former flipped the board up and shouted to the entrance, "Friendly with Renaissance man."

With that, the two climbed out of the tunnel system. John laughed as he stretched his arms, then shook his head. "At least I don't have a gun in my face this time. And it seems odd that I wasn't explained that tunnel system."

A burly looking black man approached the two and in a voice similar to James Earl Jones said, "You started from Zone One, right?"

John nodded in replied, which sparked a hearty laugh from the man. "You know what they say: 'You want brawn, get a Oney. You want brains, see a Parall. You want information, come to the Threers.' The name's General Isen, glad to meet you." He offered his hand.

"John McArthur," the cowboy replied, shaking it.

"So intelligence said you came from the past," Isen began with a smile.

John exhaled heavily and replied, "Yeah. It's...different here."

The general chuckled. "I figured so." He pulled out a black deck of cards. "Intel also said you'd want these."

John took the cards and replied, "Thank you very kindly."

Suddenly, a soldier ran up to Isen and whispered something in his ear. The general's eyes widened in alarm and grabbed John by the shoulders, pushing him into the underground system. Suddenly, a bomb went off, making the entire complex shudder.

"The Voltage have discovered you're here. You need to go!" Isen shouted as more bombs went off, "Hurry and get to Zones 4 and 5! Ask for Vagn at 4, Cadaver at 5."

"Okay," John shouted back, a look of urgency on his face as he went back down.

The cowboy hurried through the tunnel, looking at his glow stick, which had died down a little.

Holding it out in front of him, John muttered to himself, "Better get there fast."

* * *

Trivia: Each of the Zone's citizen names have to do with the numbers somehow. While Zone 1 and Zone 3 are obvious, Zone 2's citizen name comes from the visual aspect of the Roman numeral for two (II) being two parallel lines, Zone 4's comes from the superstition in Asiatic countries that four is the number of death, and Zone 5's comes from the fact that it's the fifth Fibonacci number (which will be demonstrated below).

Fibonacci numbers are basically this:

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 _**5**_ 3 1


End file.
